See Dembski Disillusioned for a very interesting article about Dembski's disillusionment with fundamentalism, especially of YEC and YEC schools.

The article quotes science activist and Panda Thumb's contributor Andrea Bottaro as having seen more clearly than anyone else what was really going on in 2010 as Dembski was called on the carpet at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary concerning his book "The End of Christianity" and whether he was sufficiently YEC enough, or not.

I wrote the PT post on this episode (see Dembski Coming Clean), but I got it wrong on several accounts (and was corrected by several of of the PT gang.) Andrea's comment is towards the end of the first page of comments.

All interesting stuff for those of you interested in the arc of Dembski's career.

I actually have some saved threads from ARN from 2000 and later. I just browsed through a few of them for nostalgia's sake: Mike Gene, Nelson Alonso, Richard Wein, and jazzraptor are some of the names I ran into. Also Phinehas and vividblue, who both still post at UD.

ARN was my first foray into debating with creationists, as 2000 was when the first Kansas science standards episode started, and Kansas Citizens for Science was formed to combat the creationists on the state school board. I'm sure that in many ways the general gist of the discussions hasn't changed, although I think the core UD crowd is really worse in some ways than anyone back then.

Then there was Dembski's ISCID, which had some pretty interesting stuff, and I ran a forum at KCFS for a long time before I closed it down due to, in part, being tired of some local crazy trolls. Also, at some point, the Panda's Thumb started (which grew out of a private list serve of science activists): it acquired some credentials and has served some useful purposes over the years, including the post mentioned in this thread.

Jason Rosenhouse's recent post (see the main UD thread) about UD is relevant to this little history of forums: UD was quite a bit more interesting when it started, but under Barry it has deteriorated.